


Cat Nap

by orphan_account



Series: Hold Back the River [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Galra!Keith, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:12:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8567017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A rather fluffy, short piece. Galra!Keith has excellent hearing, he’s always had excellent hearing. Except having good hearing is a little difficult when one is sick and one’s noise-cancelling headphones break.





	

Keith switched the light off, threw a dirty shirt over the little thermostat light, and crawled into his bunk. Somehow he’d managed to lose the eye mask he wore to sleep. But that had been two weeks ago, and he now could sleep without it. The minor ambient light in the room no longer bothered him—as long as he didn’t try to go to sleep still stuck as a Galra.

He lay on his back and put on his noise-cancelling headphones. They didn’t drown out _all_ of the noise on the ship—coolant flowing to and fro, or the air circulators, or the little click of the thermostat automatically turning on and off—but they muffled the noise enough, and he’d gotten used to not having complete silence.

(Sometimes he wished he was back in the desert. Lonely as he’d felt, at least it’d been _quiet_.)

But thirty seconds into “Gymnopédie No. 1,” Keith moved his head a little, and the soothing music disintegrated into stuttering, loud static. Keith nearly yelped and sat bolt upright, yanking the headphones off his head. He switched on the reading light and squinted at his headset. Everything appeared normal, so he turned the volume down and cautiously put them back on. The music played just fine. He moved the headphones ever so slightly—

—and static whistled in his ear.

Keith growled and once more took the headphones off. He plunked them on the nightstand, snapped the light off, and buried his head under his pillow.

The coolant whooshed, the thermostat ticked, and Keith jammed his fingers in his ears.

* * *

 

Eight hours later, Keith, Lance, and Pidge stumbled out of their respective quarters. Keith checked his reflection in his helmet visor before leaving his bunk, as had become his habit. Usually a pointless endeavor, as his changing to a Galran appearance had yet to be triggered by even the worst of his nightmares.

Today was no exception, and he knew it before he even looked. He’d only managed two hours of dozing half-asleep before the ship’s noise woke him up again. He braced his hand on the corridor wall and yawned.

“Morning, Keith!”Pidge called.

“G-mor-gng,” Keith mumbled, eyes still half shut.

“What was _that?”_ Lance demanded, right in his ear.

“Do you have to yell?” Keith hissed.

“O- _kay_ , Sleeping Beauty, _I’ll talk quieter,_ ” Lance replied in an exaggerated whisper.

“ _Thank you_.”

They entered the dining area where Hunk, Coran, Shiro, and Allura sat, already eating.

“Hey guys! I made breakfast this time!” Hunk called with his mouth full.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Lance said, plopping down next to him. Coran rolled his eyes and served the late arrivals a bowl of warm, greenish goo.

Keith grabbed a spoon and started eating without really tasting it. He rested a head in his hand, watching Lance feed the space mice between bites. They all talked around him, about a new training simulation or how close they were to their next target or _something_ —Keith didn’t listen. Or tried not to.

Spoons clinked on bowls, six other people chewed in six different ways, the thermostat _across the room_ ticked on, and even the _space mice_ chewed, their little jaws going _snip-snip-snip_. Keith shrank down in his chair, glaring at his bowl, trying to focus only on his breakfast.

“You feeling all right, Keith?” Shiro asked.

 _Wow, is it interstellar yelling day?_ “Yeah,” Keith muttered.

“You don’t look okay. You look a little pale,” Hunk stated.

“Probably the lighting,” Keith replied, finishing his breakfast and standing. He put his bowl in the dirty dishes slot and yawned again. His throat burned a little, and he sighed. _Today’s gonna be fun._

When he got sick out in the desert, and couldn’t tune out all the noise as well, he simply locked all the doors, pulled down the blinds, and buried himself in his bed with his headphones and slept until he felt better. But in space, the ship made far more noise than the desert ever did, save on stormy nights when Keith would just stay up anyway and watch the lightning. And in space, his headphones lay broken on his nightstand, and he had six other people who’d notice if he hid in his room all day.

“You sure you’re feeling okay?” Shiro asked.

“Just got a little cold. I’ll live.” He’d _have_ to deal with it; they still hadn’t figured out how to program “half-human, half-Galran” into the healing pods. Not that he wanted to spend four hours in stasis for a little head cold _._

* * *

 

“Hey, Pidge?”

Pidge looked up from her computer at Keith leaning against her doorframe. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Um, I’m not sure what I did, but I think I broke these…” Keith said, his voice hardly louder than a whisper. He stepped into the room and handed Pidge his headphones. “Can you, you know, if you have time, maybe fix them please?”

Pidge took the headphones and inspected them. She put them on her head and switched them on. Keith watched her turn the volume up far louder than he’d ever dream of setting it. “I don’t see what’s—ooh, yikes.” Pidge yanked the headphones off and turned them off. “There’s probably a few wires loose. I’ll take them apart and see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” Keith smiled tiredly. He turned to go, then paused. Something was rattling. He glanced at Pidge’s computer, then at her. “Do you  hear that?”

“No, I do not. What do your elf ears hear, Legolas?”

Keith smirked and listened for a second longer. “I think you’ve got a fan a little bit out of alignment in your computer.” He coughed. “Sounds like the secondary cooling fan, the one for your graphics card.”

“What… Don’t go anywhere,” Pidge ordered. She saved her work, shut down the laptop, and flipped it over and removed the casing. She studied it for a second, then turned the computer back on, the case still off.

“Don’t touch anything, or you’ll get shocked. But which fan is it?”

“That one,” Keith said, pointing to a small fan without hesitation. They both squinted at it; sure enough, the fan wobbled ever so slightly.

“Dude.” Pidge sat back in her chair and looked at him with wide, impressed eyes. “Can you always hear that well?”

Keith shrugged at her. “Not all the time, no. I-I’m just having a little more trouble tuning everything out today. No big deal,” he added quickly, when Pidge looked to be about to pepper him with questions and sympathy.

“All right,” Pidge said. “Thanks for figuring that out about the fan, by the way.”

“Not a problem,” Keith replied.

* * *

 

Silence filled the lounge, or as close to silence as Keith had been able to get all day. He lay curled up on the rounded couch, his jacket pulled up over his head. The thermostat ticked on, and Keith groaned. _Why do we need a thermostat in every room?!_ He listened to the ventilation shafts over his head and tried to pretend he was back in the desert, listening to the wind.

Except the desert wasn’t this cold. Keith shuddered and checked his arm. Still pink.

 _Probably a fever at this point, then_ , Keith thought, and shut his eyes. His aching head pulsed with each beat of his heart, and he coughed.

The lounge door opened, and the sounds of Coran and Hunk arguing out in the hall floated in. Light footsteps entered the room, and the door _hissed_ shut. The footsteps approached the couch and stopped. Keith curled tighter into his makeshift cocoon. “Lance, I am dead serious, I will fight you,” he rasped.

“Now that’s just offensive,” Pidge remarked.

Keith opened his eyes and shoved his jacket off his head. “Sorry,” he muttered.

Pidge crossed her arms. “Earlier today you could tell which fan in my computer was broken. But now you’re calling me Lance? What’s up with that?”

Keith rubbed his eye and sat up. “Sorry. I wasn’t really trying to differentiate the footsteps. Besides, you guys sound kinda similar when you walk.”

“Interesting.” Pidge sat next to him. “Okay, I’ve fixed your headphones, and made a pretty major modification. Put them on.”

Keith did so, and turned them on. This time “Claire de Lune” played through the headset. And though Keith could still hear Pidge next to him, it was no different than how the headphones had always worked.

“So the headphones are set to cancel noise at frequencies that humans can hear, obviously,” Pidge explained. “You can still hear me, right?”

“Yep. But barely. It’s fine, they’ve always worked like this.”

Pidge smiled. “Well, I added a setting that makes the headphones cancel out frequencies that both humans _and_ Galrans can hear.” She reached for the headset. “So if you ever want _complete_ silence, you just hit this button—”

Everything went silent, and the peaceful notes surrounded him like a warm hug. Keith couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across his face. He leaned back, his eyes drifted closed, and the tension in his shoulders melted. Sleep crept up on him, seeping into him like hot cocoa, and he sighed contentedly.

He felt Pidge get up, and he opened his eyes to see her smiling, her mouth closing from having just said something. He lifted one headphone from his ear. “What?”


End file.
